The World Wide Web has expanded to provide numerous web services to consumers. The web services may be provided by a web application which uses multiple services and applications to handle a transaction. The applications may be distributed over several machines, making the topology of the machines that provide the service more difficult to track and monitor.
Monitoring a web application helps to provide insight regarding bottle necks in communication, communication failures and other information regarding performance of the services that provide the web application. Most application monitoring tools provide a standard report regarding application performance. Though the typical report may be helpful for most users, it may not provide the particular information that an administrator wants to know.
For example, most application performance monitoring systems monitor a single application or a single request as it traverses through a set of distributed applications. This is valuable to some users, but the single request does not truly correlate to a user's entire experience with a web service. Rather, users often perform several actions, each associated with a separate request, and experience with the web service is based on the cumulative processing of the different requests. What is needed is an improved way to monitor a user experience with a web service.